"Around the magnet Faraday
Was sure that Volta's lightnings play,
But how to draw them from the wire?
He drew a lesson from the heart.—
'Tis when we meet, 'tis when we part,
Breaks forth th' electric fire."
Of this same subject Tyndall wrote shortly after Faraday's death:—"Seven and thirty years have passed since the discovery of magneto-electricity; but, if we except the extra current, until quite recently nothing of moment was added to the subject. Faraday entertained the opinion that the discoverer of a great law or principle had a right to the 'spoils'—this was his term—arising from its illustration; and guided by the principle he had discovered, his wonderful mind, aided by his wonderful ten fingers, overran in a single autumn this vast domain, and hardly left behind him the shred of a fact to be gathered by his successors."
This indeed is a quality which has been insisted upon by all who have as fellow scientists treated of the work which was done by Michael Faraday,—this quality, that is, of completion, of thoroughness in finishing that which he had commenced; he seemed to become aware almost as though by intuition of the full meaning of a discovery, and of its true bearing with regard to previous knowledge.
Great as was Faraday's work in the service of science he not only did not aim at, but he frequently declined to accept what many men would have considered but just reward. He was a chemist, a scientist, a philosopher (to give him the name which he best liked, and of which he felt most proud), and did his work as such from the purest love for it, as I have tried to show in earlier chapters. He did not seek worldly position—he was above it; he did not seek for wealth, he had no use for it, as his wants were of the simplest; he did not seek for popular applause, for the suffrage of the multitude; but what he did all his life long most earnestly and most faithfully strive for was—Truth. He ever aimed at fulfilling what the Laureate has beautifully expressed in his dedication to In Memoriam wherein he says—
"Let knowledge grow from more to more,